Having a second car might be a good idea, now that my car has passed the 100,000 mile mark. I would like a cheap, used car that I can keep on hand in case my regular car has any trouble. I don’t like to feel stranded or dependent on just one car. There is a decent little Toyota for sale. The owner says the only thing wrong is the air conditioning does not work. I would think that is easy enough to get fixed. I looked up the cost of a toyota ac compressor, and it’s not as expensive as I thought it might be.

I’ve been trolling Craigslist for a used car and not having much luck. I was hoping to find something that is a few years old but in good running condition. Most of the cars listed are either big junkers or cars that are so fucked up that the dealerships probably would not give the owner much of a trade in allowance, so they decided to try to get more money for them on their own. Dealerships are notorious for unfair and deceptive selling practices. I’ve tried 3 or 4 times to work with a damned salesperson at a dealership, but I always leave feeling violated and deceived. So I’ve never actually bought a brand new car off a dealer lot in my life. I think the main thing about using a web site like Craigslist to find a car is all about the timing. One day the car you want has not been listed yet, and another day you log in and Voila! There is the car!

Tonight’s weather forecast calls for the temperatures to drop to the lowest point this year by early morning. We actually have freeze warnings out for entire Metro area. That means that I have to bring in the houseplants and make sure that the antifreeze levels are good in all the vehicles and all that good shit. I still can’t believe that I actually have to wear a winter coat in the morning. That is a sure sign that autumn and anything associated with warmish type weather is long gone. I just hope we don’t get a lot of ice and snow this winter. I can handle the cold (though I would prefer not to) but the precipitation is what makes everything miserable and so fucking dangerous.

We aren’t known for having good drivers in regular situations around here. So when you throw any type of small kink into the mixture, these people around here just totally lose their fucking minds and the roads fill up rather quickly with wrecks along with all types of vehicles that have slid off of the part of the road.that they are supposed to have been on. So even if there really isn’t much snow and/or ice on the roads I think that playing it safe and cancelling the schools is a good idea. Those big ass yellow school buses are carrying precious cargo that need to be safe from all the crazies that just have to go out in the snow and ice no matter what.

Years ago I worked with a real estate broker who had a contract with a large national chain of movie theaters. She would always be flying all over the damned country to scout new locations for the ever growing theater chain. The last trip that she took while I was at the company was to the Rio Grande Valley. So this gave me an opportunity to learn a little about the most southern cities in Texas, but just enough to be dangerous.

The area just north of the border with Mexico known as the Rio Grande Valley includes the cities of Edinburg, McAllen, Weslaco and Harlingen. If you include the cities just south of the border in Mexico, this area has a substantial population of over 2 million people. Harlingen is the easternmost city of the four, at the intersection of Highway 77 and Highway 83. This appears to be the retail hub of the valley, with retail sales per capita above $8,000. This is a very healthy number and made the area very attractive to the movie theater executives.

There is so much shit going on when real estate is involved, that so many people don’t even realize is going on, that It can and does, take years and years of research and meetings before any shovel (or other heavy duty equipment) hits the ground to start the actual building on the site. I learned so much at that job. If the market hadn’t taken such a fucking dive back in the fucked up year or 2007 I just might have continued on with that type of career path, with that particular company or gone out on my own by now.. Guess we will never know.

Today we toured a manufacturing plant that had been shut down by their home office and put up for sale. The building is fucking huge and was used to mill cotton. Since the southern states produce an incredible amount of cotton, it made sense years ago to locate the mills close to where the raw materials were produced. However, the rising cost of American labor is the reason the company shut down this plant.

One of the big distractions for a new buyer interested in this former cotton mill property is that all the mill equipment was left sitting on the production floor. This shit is massive and had to be incredibly expensive to put into place. It is large, heavy and complicated to configure and maintain. Supposedly there is not much of a market for used equipment like this. It find it strange that the company found it cheaper and easier to buy brand fucking new equipment for the new plant facility they built in Mexico than to break down and move this shit to the new plant. It was easier to just walk away from the existing crap and leave it here for the new owner to deal with disposing of it. Once again, this is an example of how the world’s economic situation is totally fucked up.

Last night I somehow ended up on a website that actually lists what the prisoners on Death Row request for the last meal before being executed. What a creepy site that was, I can’t imagine why people would want to spend their time and effort compiling information like that. And some of the links off of that site were pretty odd also, not the type of shit that I would want to spend my time reading about, that is for sure.

It just fucking amazes me what excites and interests people. I don’t mind a good horror story, but I can do without watching one at the movies. I really don’t get what the fuck people get out of this shit. Give me a good comedy or an old fashioned love story any day. The world is full of violence and total madness and to think that there are people out there capitalizing on this type of violence just drives me crazy.

And now that we can find and see just about anything we can think of on the Internet I don’t think that we have any boundaries left. And don’t even get me started on all things that are going on with the ever increasing use of Facebook. I’ll save that for another day.